


The Dwarf and the Dragon

by FasterPuddyTat



Series: Gall, Vitriol, and Wine: An Incomplete History [5]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Hawke Walks Out of the Fade, I Will Go Down With This Ship, Non-Canon Relationship, One Shot, Post-Canon Fix-It, Purple Hawke (Dragon Age), Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-06
Updated: 2020-01-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:48:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22149706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FasterPuddyTat/pseuds/FasterPuddyTat
Summary: Hawke walked out of Fade. Varric doesn't believe it. Well, not at first.You can hardly blame him. It's not every day your best friend comes back as a dragon.
Relationships: Female Hawke/Varric Tethras
Series: Gall, Vitriol, and Wine: An Incomplete History [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1617364
Comments: 14
Kudos: 62





	The Dwarf and the Dragon

**Author's Note:**

> I COULD NOT get this idea out of my head. It was going to be part of my longfic Everything, but the more I thought about it, the more it didn't fit. 
> 
> So! One shot it is!

Viscount Tethras. He grunted. Heavy was the head that wore the crown and all that. Really, being viscount wasn’t so different than the old days. He had palms to grease and pissing contests to win, and his eyesight wasn't so bad that he confused the two. Yet. 

Ha. That’d be a day for the record books. 

He adjusted his spectacles to examine the thick sheaf of papers on his desk, the Guard Captain’s daily report. He flicked through the pages, construction in Lowtown resumed, petty larceny up in Hightown, casualty numbers from the latest Darktown plague. He let the pages fall when he reached the number, single digits today, maybe double tomorrow. 

He pushed the glasses up to rub his eyes, gritty and sore from too many wakeful hours. He still rose at the same strange, neither early nor late hour every night, the iron bands at his chest, the flat void of empty sheets. He’d reach to her side and rest his palm there. Sometimes, on the really bad nights, he’d swear they were warm. 

His door burst open. He looked up to see a ragged miner, face streaked with grime and eyes wide, running to his desk with Bran at his heels.

“Viscount!” the man shouted, the stink of old sweat a physical blow to Varric’s senses when he stopped at the desk.

“Serah, please!” Bran said “The Viscount is busy!”

The miner rounded on him. “It’s his mine, innit! No one else'll help us, least of all a pissant noble like you.” He turned to Varric, fists clenched. “Viscount. Boss. It’s the Bone Pit.”

Varric crossed his arms. “Don’t you lot get paid enough to stomp the occasional spider down there?”

“We en’t paid to slay dragons, boss. An’ there’s a bloody huge one dropped out of the sky just as we was setting down to lunch.”

“A what now?”

“Jolly big blighter, all purple an’ green. We scattered expectin’ an attack but the damn thing just sat there staring at us, feckin’ _breathing._ Y’gotta go flush ‘er out, boss. She’s bleedin’ unsettling.”

Varric rubbed his brow, pushing the sharp edge of the Viscount’s crown into his scalp. _You owe me, Hawke,_ he thought to himself. Just like the old Amell estate, he hadn’t been able to part with Hawke’s thrice-cursed mine. Assuming full ownership of the place was the last thing she’d done before everything went to shit. Holding on to that dismal real estate felt like a favor, one of the last he could do for her. Didn’t hurt that it financed a good portion of his rebuilding efforts, which felt a bit like a favor she’d done him in return. Hawke, looking out for him even now, even after…

He stood abruptly, scattering Aveline’s report. Bran flinched back, surprised by the wave of brutality that rolled from his Viscount’s short, powerful form. Varric could have laughed. It had been too long since he’d shown his teeth in the office. Well. Time to remind them who Varric Goddamn Tethras was.

“I’ll need an hour to get my people together,” he told the miner. He flipped him a silver. “Get something to eat and tell the rest they're off 'til tomorrow.”

The miner caught the coin with a nod and left in a hurry. Varric rolled his shoulder, stiff from too many hours behind the desk. Bran opened his mouth to protest, but Varric’s scathing look clacked his teeth shut before any further idiocy could slip past them. He shook out his old duster, the leather soft from hard use and gentle care, the layers of silk newly replaced, shining red and welcoming. Its heavy weight settled on his shoulders as he shrugged into it, and the embrace of Bianca’s harness cinched tight across his chest. He clipped her in. As she pulled the harness tighter, he felt his muscles remember their old strength. Once, he’d been strong enough for two. That was before. Now he carried many, but all of Kirkwall hadn’t been enough to match her specific gravity. 

He twisted the ring on his finger, rolling the edge on his flesh until it hurt. He looked at the red line he’d drawn for a moment, then covered it with a glove. He went to find his friends.

...

He led them from the front, as she had. Aveline clanked behind him in her plate and he could feel the heat of her concern burning into the back of his neck. Daisy stepped lightly beside her, a faint swish of cloth, the rasp of dry grass on her staff. Her hand rested lightly on his shoulder now and again, a shared melancholy in her touch. 

It was just the three of them now, the others having scattered to the four corners of the map. Fenris and the Rivaini kept in touch when they thought of him, less now than… well. Sunshine wrote often, her letters brief shafts of light into his grey hours. He hoped his replies, his memories, did the same for her. He heard tales of Anders now and then, a blond apostate in black feathers appearing after battles, healing the wounded, singing last rites for the dead. He popped up all over Thedas, more myth now than man. That suited Varric just fine, so long as myth and man stayed well away from Kirkwall.

They came over the rise, expecting the usual stench and scattered corpses. There were none. A bonfire crackled merrily in the center of a tidy camp, abandoned bread smoldering on the ring of rocks containing it. Varric held up a hand for silence. Aveline planted her feet to stop the bang and scrape of her plate as best she could. Daisy set her hand on his shoulder again, her head tilted into the breeze.

“Ooh, I hear her. She sounds… lost. And sad. So sad.” She turned to look into his eyes, her own bright with the dragon’s pain. “Varric, she sounds like you.”

Varric heard her too. A low rasp of slow breath, a scuffle of scale on stone. He drew Bianca and motioned them on toward the quarry. There was no muffling Aveline’s stride, so he made no attempt to hide their progress down the dusty path. A stink wound its way into his nose, burning sulfur and carrion, scorched wood and, flowers? He sniffed carefully, sifting through the repulsive to tease out the one pure note. He knew that scent.

They rounded the final bend. He held up a fist, and they stopped to stare. The dragon had curled in the sunlight on the highest rise of the quarry, all but impossible to reach. She watched them as they stepped from the path, but made no move to attack. Her scales shone in the sun, dark, bruised violet, an iridescent green rippling over them. She tested the air, searching. For blood? Fear? She’d find neither from him. Varric stepped further into the quarry, Bianca aimed at the dragon’s soft belly. 

“Oi, dragon,” he called out. She tilted her massive horned head at the sound of his voice. “Yeah you. This is _my_ mine, savvy? I’ll give you a count of three to clear out, and then Bianca here will start counting in hers. One.” The dragon pushed heavily to her feet, clumsy, her back legs at odds with the front. “Two.” She stumbled and shook herself, sheets of stone dust falling from her scales. She tried to step down the rise, but her leg gave way and she slid down the wall to crumple to the ground with a wheeze. He felt a strange ache in his chest for the beast, to be so magnificent and so reckless at once. It reminded him of her.

Aveline readied her guard as the dragon rolled on the ground, wings caught under taloned feet, tail lashing the stone walls. She looked at Varric, concern in her steely eyes.

“Fall back, Varric. She’s bluffing. She could charge any moment.”

The dragon ceased her thrashing at the sound of Aveline’s voice. She let her great head flop to the ground and fixed Varric with one green eye. He blinked. He raised Bianca to sight that eye in his scope. It bloomed before him, gold flecked green, upturned in an eternal smile. 

No.

He lowered his weapon. The dragon blinked at him, her breath slow and heavy in that huge chest. He took one step. Another. Bianca fell to the dust, forgotten. Aveline called out, some frantic warning, some dull, unseeing thing. He heard plate shift behind him and Daisy’s clarion call, a high, sweet _wait._

Silence. 

He was right on top of her, the stink of rotten flesh and fire and wilted flowers a living thing that assaulted all five of his senses and left him gasping. She closed that great green eye. He sank to his knees before her.

“H…Hawke?”

The dragon sighed. Her breath was hot and humid, spiked with burning lilacs. _Lilacs._ He choked out a sob and collapsed onto her long nose, heedless of her sharp scales as they tore his silk tunic. She shuddered below him and pressed her head into his chest, gentle and scalding. He curled around her and burned, blinking away the damp that had gathered in his eyes.

It splashed onto those scales the color of fresh bruises with a hiss, and Hawke the dragon jerked. He fell back, suddenly aware that the thing he’d clung to was death itself. The dragon convulsed as he kicked away from her, as a fierce, foreign power wracked her huge form. It grew, arcing with bright gold, tearing into her flesh as she screamed. Varric slapped his hands to his ears and screamed with her as she writhed beneath the wild magic’s fury. 

The golden light spun around her faster and faster, a vortex in the sky that took and took and took from her form, whittling the scales from her flesh, the muscle, the bone. A white light exploded from her center, blinding him. He clutched his head, rocking, whispering _please,_ and _no,_ over and over, like a prayer. Silence claimed the quarry.

Slowly, he realized his ragged breathing wasn’t alone. He rubbed his eyes and looked up, looked to Daisy and Aveline beside him. They were statues, held in frozen vigil at the sight before them. Their breath was deep and even, awed, not harsh. He followed their gaze.

A woman lay before them, naked and bleeding. Dark hair ruffled in the breeze and her ribs shuddered with every breath. Breath. He struggled to his feet. She was breathing. He crossed to her, read her atlas of scars. He knelt beside her beaten body and rolled her into his arms. Her eyes were closed, her lips chapped and split. He kissed them anyway, gently, his own breath shaking in his throat. He ran a hand through her hair, matted with blood and chopped in ragged locks. Her hand drifted up to rest on his arm. He broke away to see her green eyes smiling at him.

“Miss me?” she croaked.

“Hawke…” 

He crushed her to him, unbelieving and aching with light. She buried her face in his chest and breathed him in, the dust, the sweat. He shook with the weight of years spent trying to move on and failing, always failing. She clung to him with the last of her strength, trembling and thin as it was, the scent of lilacs in her hair. 

Daisy approached on silent feet to lay her cloak around Hawke’s shoulders. Aveline was gone when he looked up, but soon he heard her clanking down the quarry path, a plain tunic and torn trousers over her arm. He raised Hawke up to sit beside him and together they dressed her, together they wiped the worst of the blood from her skin. 

She tried to stand. Her knees buckled and he caught her, a sharp breath at how light she’d become in the Fade. Hawke had always been shockingly heavy, solid muscle and several pounds of sharp steel. He was sick with the featherweight body in his arms. He tightened them around her, afraid to let go, afraid she would disappear if he did. He started up the trail back to Kirkwall.

———

“A dragon!” Hawke laughed, rich and full.

Varric grinned. His fingers traced the fading blush of her chest, sliding on the sweat that beaded there. Hawke shook her head. She grabbed his neck and kissed him hard, kissed him with the focused fury that had seen her through the Fade. He let himself be kissed, lazy and spent. She broke away to lean her forehead on his.

“You always said you wanted to become a dragon,” he said. “Makes a better story than, ‘Hawke stumbled into her old home half dead and collapsed in a puddle of vomit on Varric’s new rug.’”

She snickered. “That’s why you’re the storyteller,” she said. “Fine. You have my blessing.”

He nudged her up to press a chaste kiss to her lips. She hummed against him as she edged away, breaking the kiss at the last possible moment as she slipped from the bed. He looked at her, still gaunt, still mending. He sighed with a pleasure too great to name. 

“There’s only one story left to tell then, isn’t there,” she said, her eyes lingering on the curve and swell of him. 

“Which?”

She placed the Viscount’s crown on her shaggy hair and smiled. He fell up into her eyes, that strange gravity he could never escape, and never wanted to.

“Ours.”


End file.
